The Key to the Successful Implementation of Web3: Restoring Agency to Genuine Participants by Shifting Discourse Power from Traders

Solv Protocol co-founder Meng Yan pointed out the three main reasons why Web3 has not yet been fully developed: the market fundamentally does not believe in the future of Web3, the infrastructure is weak, and the industry lacks a solid methodology. However, these problems seem to be gradually resolved.

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Web3 industry is gradually losing favor
Reasons: lack of substantial innovation, frequent negative news
Solution: quickly find valuable innovations in Web3
Why is Web3 not currently being implemented?
Key 1: The market fundamentally does not believe in Web3
Web3 has clear value and solid technology
Market perception is influenced by the wrong people
Key 2: Web3 Infrastructure
Web3 infrastructure is already capable of action
Challenges of Web3 infrastructure: fragmented resources
Key 3: Web3 Core Thinking
More precise description of the core value of Web3
Get rid of the cypherpunk ideology
More comprehensive thinking on token applications
Start actively incorporating compliance thinking
Web3 may have the opportunity to land in the near future
There are not many people willing to speak for crypto now. Since the drastic collapse of the crypto market in 2022, the curiosity and patience of the outside world towards the crypto industry have basically been exhausted. Today, apart from the stakeholders within this industry, it is difficult to find external individuals who do not have biases and hold positive views towards crypto.

The global political and economic situation is gradually becoming complex, tense, and confrontational, and many people are having a hard time. Against this backdrop, if an industry that is generally regarded as primarily speculative and gambling appears to be unusually prosperous, it will be particularly eye-catching.

If the crypto market enters a bull market in the future, these biases and strong negative views can easily turn into jealousy and hatred, and then into intense intervention or even attacks on the crypto industry (such as regulation). In more serious cases, the market may collapse instantly due to external intervention, causing trouble for some people.

People in the crypto industry need to be mentally prepared for this.

To address the above problems, valuable, influential, and persuasive innovations in the Web3 field must be found as soon as possible.

However, before discussing Web3 innovations, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between crypto and Web3. Meng Yan defines it as follows:

Crypto: Defined as the trading of encrypted digital assets
Web3: Defined as a technological innovation movement aimed at building a trusted digital economy
Ideally, crypto and Web3 are interrelated, with Web3 being the physical economy of crypto, and crypto being the virtual economy of Web3. However, in reality, crypto has dominated this combination for many years, with a strong virtual presence but weak substance, constantly innovating in speculation, resulting in a long period of stagnation in Web3 applications.

The main reasons for the slow development of Web3 applications are three key points:

The market fundamentally does not believe in the future of Web3
The infrastructure required for Web3 success is very weak
Web3 has not established a solid ideology and methodology
If these three problems are solved, the innovative applications of Web3 will theoretically flourish. Can these three problems be solved in 2024? Meng Yan believes it is possible.

The first problem: “Does Web3 have a future?”
The narrative of Web3 is not difficult to understand. It is mainly based on a series of cryptographic innovations to build a self-sovereign and trusted contract environment in the digital economy. The technological foundation of Web3 is also solid, with unquestionable feasibility, clear logic, and clear value. Therefore, the development prospects should not be a problem.

However, due to premature financialization, there have been many disruptions to the narrative of Web3. Vitalik recently complained about the so-called “Degen gamblers,” which is also due to this reason.

(Advocating to return to the cypherpunk mentality! Vitalik’s ideal social model for blockchain and Ethereum, integrating speculation and development)

There is a well-known but rarely openly acknowledged secret within the industry, which is that a significant portion of the “most successful” people in “this industry” do not understand Web3 and do not believe in Web3. These people fundamentally do not believe that blockchain and decentralized technologies have any other uses besides speculative trading. Therefore, these successful individuals in “this industry” often half-publicly propagate that blockchain is not applicable to the real economy, mock Web3 as a castle in the air, and claim that it is impossible to achieve, especially in the Asian crypto circles.

The above situation severely interferes with the general public’s understanding of Web3.

The reason for this absurd situation is that the outside world generally confuses the crypto and Web3 industries. In fact, among the successful individuals in the crypto trading market, many do not understand the technology, especially have a shallow understanding of cryptography. They only treat crypto assets as another speculative target and temporarily gain good returns through speculative trading or market manipulation. However, they do not understand, care about, or bother to learn the underlying logic of Web3, nor can they see the potential impact of cryptographic technology on the real economy and life.

If Web3 is mistakenly equated with crypto and judged solely based on profitability, most people in the market may regard these temporary winners in trading as successful individuals in the Web3 industry and believe that they possess higher knowledge and treat their words as the truth.

However, this is a serious misunderstanding. A successful trader in the crypto market may be an expert in speculation, master of market psychology, market manipulator, insider trader, professional arbitrageur, or simply a lucky person. But all of these possibilities have no relevance to their understanding of Web3. Such a successful individual may not even have a basic understanding of Web3 technology concepts and may genuinely believe that cryptography is esoteric, blockchain is not suitable for extensive use, and Web3 is pure hype.

In the real world, if a Wall Street trader gives directions for innovation to an AI model or asserts that there is a structural error in the molecular formula of a certain anti-cancer drug, most people would think that this person is delusional. No one would think that this person has more authority than professors from OpenAI or Johns Hopkins University just because they made money in AI or biotech stocks. However, this scenario continues to unfold in the Web3 industry.

The discourse power of Web3 must be returned to those who are genuinely innovating and working on Web3, clearly conveying the narrative of Web3, and demonstrating the future, logic, and feasibility of Web3. This will solve the question of “whether Web3 has a future.”

The problem of weak Web3 infrastructure has indeed been a significant challenge over the past decade. People’s expectations for Web3 have far outpaced the development of infrastructure, resulting in many applications that have good ideas but cannot be implemented or have poor results. This has also led to a fragmented development of Web3 applications.

However, the situation has gradually improved. With the continuous development of blockchain technology, the infrastructure for Web3 is becoming more mature, providing a solid foundation for the development of Web3 applications.

The third problem is the lack of solid thinking and methodology in Web3. This problem is gradually being solved with the deepening understanding of Web3’s core values and the exploration of comprehensive token application scenarios. It is necessary to get rid of the cypherpunk ideology and actively incorporate compliance thinking to establish a more comprehensive and practical methodology for Web3.

If these three problems are solved, the innovative applications of Web3 will flourish. Whether these problems can be solved by 2024 remains to be seen, but there is a possibility.

In conclusion, Web3 is an innovative movement with clear value and solid technology. The market’s belief in Web3 is influenced by the wrong individuals. The infrastructure for Web3 is gradually becoming stronger, although challenges remain. Web3 also needs to establish a more precise description of its core values and move away from the cypherpunk ideology. By solving these problems, Web3 has the opportunity to land in the near future.One of the important reasons why some people claim that Web3 is not feasible is because they lack technical understanding and can only make judgments based on surface phenomena. But is this really the case?

The infrastructure of Web3 has made significant progress in recent years. The term “infrastructure” here not only refers to blockchain, but also includes zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), accounts, DeFi, wallets, development tools, developer education resources, and other protocol layers and auxiliary components.

It is worth noting that stablecoins are also a type of infrastructure and may be one of the most core infrastructures. The development of stablecoins, compliant stablecoins, and CBDCs is actually an important condition for discussing application innovation in Web3 today.

So, how far has the development of Web3 infrastructure come? In short, it has taken shape. In terms of performance, it has reached a level where it can take action. In terms of cost, with the help of subsidies and incentives from some token economies, it also has the conditions for large-scale promotion. So, macroscopically speaking, both in terms of performance and cost, it is already sufficient to support large-scale and high-traffic application scenarios.

Overall, the development of Web3 infrastructure has reached a preliminary stage, providing innovators with a rich combination of options. Web3 innovators in 2024 should no longer use weak technological infrastructure as an excuse.

If we really want to say, the main problem with the current infrastructure is the fragmentation caused by different factions. Regarding blockchain, each network has its own strengths and weaknesses, and there has yet to be a balanced option in all aspects.

(What is chain abstraction? A more comprehensive improvement in user experience than account abstraction)

Ethereum has good security, a large asset scale, and a large number of developers, but its performance is poor. Various EVM competing chains and Layer2 have excellent performance, but their asset scale is limited. Solana has good performance and complete tools, but the number of developers is too small.

The third problem is the issue of guiding ideology and methodology, which is currently the most urgent problem. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entire Web3 industry is still groping in the dark in terms of ideology, not knowing which direction to take to break through first.

Before Google established its advertising business model in 2004, the internet industry was in this state. Many people understood the key points and potential of internet technology, speculated on some directions based on theory, and created some applications, but none of them worked. Apart from simple content delivery and distribution such as email and illegal activities, they did not know what the internet could be used for, let alone how to make money.

Today’s Web3 is the same. There are many theoretical ideas, but apart from digital asset transfers, remittances, and speculation, there is no feasible application, and it is not known what other profit models there are besides selling assets in various ways. The entire industry is waiting for a major breakthrough in methodology.

Meng Yan is optimistic about this. In the past few years, the Web3 industry has made important progress in the forefront of ideology. This includes a more accurate understanding and description of the core values of Web3. More and more people are starting to consider “autonomy” and “trustworthiness” as the fundamental values of Web3, adjusting the previous attitude of considering “decentralization” as the ultimate goal.

In fact, “decentralization” is only one of the means to achieve autonomy and trustworthiness, and in many cases, it is not the most reasonable means.

Meng Yan believes that in 2024, through in-depth theoretical exploration and practical cases, the most innovative pioneers in the Web3 industry will be able to break free from the misconception of “decentralization only” and focus more on autonomy, autonomous accounts, autonomous assets, autonomous data and cross-verification, and trusted computing, which will bring about significant changes in the Web3 technology stack, moving from simply relying on blockchain to comprehensive application of the latest cryptographic technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, visual cryptography, and decentralized identities.

Secondly, there is a fundamental change in the attitude towards regulation. Regulatory and law enforcement agencies in more regions today have stronger confidence, less concern, more decisive decision-making, and faster actions in determining which behaviors are innovative, fraudulent, or illegal.

Web3 is integrating regulatory technology (RegTech) and actively supporting reasonable regulatory mechanisms, both out of necessity and as a trend. More and more Web3 projects will actively support regulatory needs, which is necessary and timely.

The above does not mean that all the methodological problems of Web3 have been solved. In fact, there are still many unresolved issues, such as how to achieve a balance between freedom, compliance, privacy, and transparency? How to profit? How to demonstrate advantages that opponents cannot overcome in competition with Web2? However, the industry’s thinking has indeed made progress and is emerging in the right direction.

Based on these three judgments:

– If the discourse power of Web3 can successfully transition to real participants
– If Web3 infrastructure is already usable
– If the core thinking of Web3 is gradually improving

Meng Yan believes that in the next one or two years, there may be large-scale innovations with potential for real-world economic applications, which will allow Web3 projects to become sustainable long-term investments rather than just speculative tools.

CRYPTO
Web3
Core thinking of Web3

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